B.C. town rode to rescue of horses

By BILL BRIOUX For The Canadian PressPublished December 15, 2012 - 5:38pm Last Updated December 16, 2012 - 8:30am

CTV premieres story based on real-life event

MacKenzie Porter and Aidan Quinn star in The Horses of McBridge, which airs tonight at 8 p.m. on CTV. It’s based on the true story of McBride, B.C., a town that rallied to dig out two horses trapped behind a wall of snow after an avalanche. (CTV)

TURNER VALLEY, Alta. — When Aidan Quinn returned to this picturesque town outside Calgary last March to shoot The Horses of McBride, he was happy to see a familiar face — John Scott.

The veteran horse wrangler and Alberta rancher has been helping everyone from Brad Pitt to Sam Elliott to Jackie Chan stay in the saddle for 40 years. Scott worked with Quinn, Pitt and Anthony Hopkins on the 1994 feature Legends of the Fall and with Quinn again on the 2007 HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

“He’s the reason I wasn’t thrown off,” Quinn says of Scott’s efforts to keep him in the saddle on those earlier pictures.

On The Horses of McBride, which premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. on CTV, Quinn’s cowboy character is seen more often on a snowmobile than a horse.

They’re all based on the Jeck family of McBride, B.C., who, in 2008, rallied their community to pick up shovels and dig out two horses trapped in a similar, real-life predicament.

Quinn, a native of Chicago who now lives with his family outside of New York City (a short commute to his new series, Elementary), went so far as to listen to an audio clip of David Jeck on set every day to try to capture the real cowboy’s accent and cadence for the film.

Scott did not have to do much work with Matchett and Porter on McBride. Both are quite at home on horseback. Porter grew up on a ranch in Medicine Hat, Alta., and Matchett, a native of Spalding, Sask., grew up riding in Lethbridge, Alta.

His big challenge was to come up with the four-legged stars of the TV movie — Lady and Slim. They needed to look as if they had been starving on a mountain. Scott found two rescue horses in Cochrane, Alta., and Penticton, B.C. They had to match up with two healthy horses used earlier in the production in scenes showing the horses before they became trapped in the snow.

Scott says it was a greater challenge to find the two emaciated horses than finding the 400 he had to wrangle in New Zealand during production of The Lord of the Rings.

“Trying to find malnourished horses with the same markings (as the healthy horses), it was a hard thing to do. I’ve got a lot of friends in the horse business that helped me a lot, and I had probably 40-50 people looking, but it took quite a while.”

The two horses gained weight during production, “as did I,” kids Quinn. Now healthy, homes were found for them after McBride wrapped.

Scott has worked with his share of two-legged actors before. He says Clint Eastwood, who he wrangled horses for on Unforgiven, is one of the greats, especially as a director. “Some days we were three days ahead of schedule on Unforgiven,” he says. “He likes a quiet set — no walkie-talkies.”

Pitt, he says, had never been on a horse before Scott broke him in on Legends of the Fall. By the end of the picture, Pitt looked at home on the range. “Brad Pitt rode seven different horses,” says Scott. “I thought he looked good on them all.”

Chan was another one of Scott’s cowboy converts. The two worked together on Shanghai Noon. “He was a perfectionist. He wanted everything to look real good,” recalls Scott. “After 12 days, it looked like Jackie Chan had been on a horse his whole life.”